Other pages tagged with "Paul de Man"http://www.rc.umd.edu/taxonomy/term/24502/all
enBiopoetics, or Romanticismhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/biopolitics/HTML/praxis.2012.guyer
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2012-12-01T00:00:00-05:00">December 2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/biopolitics">Romanticism and Biopolitics</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div xmlns="" id="container"> </div>
<div id="container">
<div id="body.1_div.1">
<h2 style="text-align: center">Romanticism, Forgery and the Credit Crisis</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center">Biopoetics, or Romanticism</h3>
<p xmlns="">
<strong>Sara Guyer</strong>
<br/>
<strong>University of Wisconsin, Madison</strong>
</p>
<div style="text-align: center" id="menu"><a class="blueboxsm" href="/praxis/biopolitics/HTML/abstracts.html#GuyerAbstract">article abstract</a> | <a class="blueboxsm" href="/praxis/biopolitics/HTML/about.html#GuyerAbout">about the author</a> | <a class="blueboxsm" href="/praxis/biopolitics/search.html">search volume</a></div>
<br xmlns=""/>
<table xmlns="" width="100%" cellpadding="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="50%">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="text-align: left" class="boldblue" id="print">
<a onclick="window.print();return false;" href="#">[print full essay]</a>
</div>
</td>
<td width="50%">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="text-align: right" id="tei">
<a href="/sites/default/files/imported/praxis/biopolitics/XML/guyer.xml">
<img alt="TEI" height="15" width="80" align="right" src="/sites/default/files/imported/praxis/biopolitics/images/xml-tei_button.gif"/>
</a>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class=""><strong>1</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In his last lecture of 1975-76, Michel Foucault focused on &#8220;power&#8217;s hold over life&#8221; (239), and in particular the emergence in the nineteenth century of sovereignty as a power over life, rather than death, sovereignty as &#8220;the right to make live and let die&#8221; (241). As Foucault explains in the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History of Sexuality</span>, &#8220;The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life&#8221; (262), two &#8220;techniques&#8221; that Foucault identifies not in philosophy but &#8220;in the form of concrete arrangements&#8221; (262). Foucault&#8217;s insight has opened up the epoch of biopower, providing the terms and frames though which everything from sexuality to human rights can be understood as occurring in the aftermath of this shift in the very significance of life itself.</p>
<p class=""><strong>2</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;British (and French) poets writing at more or less the same time as the planners and statisticians who Foucault considers, that is, from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, might also be understood to register a new significance of life itself. As Denise Gigante most recently has argued in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Life: Organic Form and Romanticism</span>, a preoccupation with life&#8212;in her case, understood as organicism, vitality, or nature&#8212;binds the poets we typically call romantic. For Gigante, the romantics were writers (like the scientists who are their contemporaries) &#8220;committed to defining and representing the incalculable, uncontrollable&#8212;often capricious, always ebullient&#8212;power of vitality&#8221; (3). This is a power that the poets also sought to categorize, calculate, and manage, if not through new forms of record keeping and sanitation, then through new uses of older tropes and figures. In this sense, poetry can be understood as another of the &#8220;concrete arrangements&#8221; or &#8220;techniques&#8221; of power for the management of life, another site of the power over life, like vaccination or the variety of emergent forms of public health to which he alludes. This is true both in a thematic and a strategic sense: literature of the period takes the power over life as a theme, but it also takes life as its object. We would have to look no further than a novel like Mary Shelley&#8217;s 1818 <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span> to find a clear example in which all of these senses of life and power emerge. There we find that race, the question of the human species, education, the threat to populations, and the emergence of new projects in biomedical engineering are construed as analogous to literature itself; and literature (formed as a novel, but figured as poetry) emerges as a kind of life. Indeed, Shelley famously refers to her literary fiction as a newly formed life, more or less substitutable with and even allegorized by the life-form whose existence the novel traces. Thus <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span> could be read as a vivid example of the analogy between what Foucault calls <em xmlns="">biopower</em> and literary power&#8212;or literature as a form of biopower. Yet, that what is at stake in this convergence is a monstrous formation whose full frontal force never can be grasped suggests, at least allegorically speaking, the sublime impact&#8212;on poetry and politics both&#8212;of this new power over life.<a href="#1">&#160;[1]</a><a name="back1">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>3</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;One way of understanding this convergence&#8212;the more or less simultaneous emergence of life as the medium of political <em xmlns="">and</em> poetic power, the emergence of biopower <em xmlns="">and</em> romantic poetry&#8212;is as an historical or terminological <em xmlns="">accident</em>, rather than a series of effects with a shared cause. Indeed, the romantic preoccupation with sovereignty (as lyric subjectivity) and poetic power as a vital force sits uneasily with Foucault&#8217;s account of biopower, even as it shares its constitutive terms. The lyric subject, at least as it is conventionally characterized, is a resoundingly individual formation, whereas biopower, in Foucault&#8217;s account, is administrative and neither oriented towards nor executed by the individual. Moreover, recent critics of biopower, including Lauren Berlant and Eric Santner, also have noted the flawed tendency to correlate the variety of conceptions of sovereignty (personal, political, and theological), a tendency that the correlation between romanticism and biopolitics could even be said to repeat.<a href="#2">&#160;[2]</a><a name="back2">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>4</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Yet, following Foucault, we might go further and ask about the conditions that allow life at this moment to emerge as an object (both aim and concern) of poetry and politics, of lyric subjectivity and political sovereignty? Put another way, we might ask whether this is strictly a nineteenth-century formation or rather, a late-twentieth-century one articulated in and through a return to the nineteenth century texts and contexts that have been called our contemporaries?<a href="#3">&#160;[3]</a><a name="back3">&#160;</a> Does this new preoccupation with the power over life simply occur in the nineteenth century as an arbiter of modern poetry and politics or is it a retroactive formation framed by two competing theoretical gestures belonging to the 1970s and figured through a past that it recasts even as it is conditioned by it? Is this the modernity of the nineteenth-century or of the late-twentieth century?</p>
<p class=""><strong>5</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;It is the very shape of this temporal knot that has led me, elsewhere, to conceive of romanticism as a <span xmlns="" class="titlem">poetics of survival</span>, that is, as preoccupied with and producing a condition of living on, while at the same time figuring and instantiating life as beyond or in excess of the opposition between life and death. In this essay, I wish to develop my earlier account in a somewhat different direction by focusing on the concurrent socio-political and rhetorico-lyrical preoccupations with making live. Taking seriously the shifting conception of life as the object of politics and poetics in the nineteenth century&#8212;and the initial articulation of this shift in the 1970s, the years of Foucault&#8217;s &#8220;Society must be defended&#8221; lectures, the publication of the first volume of his <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Sexuality</span> [1976], and of Paul de Man&#8217;s essays &#8220;Autobiography as De-Facement&#8221; and &#8220;Shelley Disfigured&#8221; [1979]&#8212;I will argue that there is a correspondence between biopolitics and romanticism that is captured in this shared preoccupation with life, and that it is a conception of poetry and politics that is uncontained by the nineteenth century.<a href="#4">&#160;[4]</a><a name="back4">&#160;</a> I will also suggest that this conjunction becomes an occasion to recognize life as survival, and thus to consider something about life that the various demographers and managers who appear in Foucault&#8217;s texts (and in his only cursorily formulated and digressive account of biopower) may not be in a position to perceive or comprehend, but nevertheless continue to expose.<a href="#5">&#160;[5]</a><a name="back5">&#160;</a> In other words, far from exhausted by Foucault&#8217;s account of biopower and the theoretical accounts to which it has given rise, a lyric consideration of life, one formulated in and through romanticism trains us to see beyond the management of species and populations and to recognize the excesses that biopower and its institutions inherently fail to contain. In other words, while it might appear from my opening observation that modern poets are managers, belonging to the same category as statisticians and public health officials, and that lyric sovereignty, insofar as it is focused upon making live, is a mode of administration, several examples suggest instead the undoing of individual formations by the very gesture that appears to contain it. These lyric examples show that life is always on the side of nonpower, and that its containment fails to sustain the newly formulated opposition between life and death that is at the heart of the shift that Foucault so compellingly describes.<a href="#6">&#160;[6]</a><a name="back6">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>6</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In what follows, I will turn from Paul de Man&#8217;s formative rhetorical account of the lyric to Barbara Johnson&#8217;s feminist revision of de Man in order to develop my own analysis of <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>. Johnson&#8217;s consideration of a subgenre of abortion lyric fosters a rethinking of the modern lyric and its rhetorical effects, identifying a shift in its organization from aiming to overcome the opposition between the living and the nonliving (in other words, &#8220;making live&#8221;) to imagining a relation between mother and child, whether dead or alive, as two potentialities. This example is a clear instance of the intersection of poetics and politics around the question of life, and one that, like <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span>, dramatizes the encounter between biopolitics and romanticism. Moreover, Johnson explicitly shows how lyric apostrophe can be understood not only as the trope of politics, but a trope that turns politics into biopolitics. From Johnson&#8217;s discussion of lyric animation and its political&#8212;or as I suggest&#8212;biopolitical&#8212;implications, I turn to a poem by John Clare that offers another way of imagining the lyric and its relation to biopolitics. Clare, a poet known as much for his lurid biography, his use of local idiom and eccentric grammar, and his opposition to the Enclosure Acts that divided his parish, spent a third of his life in a mental asylum. By focusing on questions of animation in the context of a lived fiction experienced as a pathology, a debilitating delusion that kept Clare from living among others, I propose to develop Johnson&#8217;s reading of lyric apostrophe into a theory that further emphasizes the lyric rhetoric at work in the politics of life and making live.</p>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.1">
<h4 style="text-align: center">I. A Fetal Address</h4>
<p class=""><strong>7</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Despite having written extensively on romantic lifewriting and on Percy Shelley&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Triumph of Life</span>, Paul de Man seemed to have very little interest in the question of life itself. Indeed, life, like death, for de Man is a linguistic predicament, and those texts that seem most preoccupied with life (I am thinking here of &#8220;Autobiography as De-facement&#8221; and &#8220;Shelley Disfigured&#8221;), are not simply &#8220;about&#8221; death or even the undecidability between life and death (recall: &#8220;one moves, without compromise, from death <em xmlns="">or</em> life to life <em xmlns="">and</em> death [<span xmlns="" class="titlem">Rhetoric of Romanticism,</span> 74]), but about figures and figural language. When in his essays of the late-1970s, later collected in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Rhetoric of Romanticism</span>, de Man apparently turns away from organicist accounts of language (that is, language as a vehicle of life), he does so in order to turn our attention to the ideology of rhetoric (or literature) as a restorative, indeed indissociably restorative and privative, operation. Autobiography (or lifewriting) operates through a figurative movement that &#8220;deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.&#8221; (And returning to the example I introduced above, Mary Shelley&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span> recognizes this in all of the scenes where the encounter between Victor Frankenstein and his creature, involves a series of faintings and restorations.) Although de Man focuses on Wordsworth&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Essays upon Epitaphs</span> and Percy Shelley&#8217;s &#8220;Triumph of Life,&#8221; privation, disfiguration, and restoration in his account are not matters of life and death, an assumption that would remain within an organicist paradigm, albeit a negative one, but rather matters of cognition, apparition, and image. It is sensation, and the relation between the visible and the knowable worlds, rather than life and death, that are at the core of de Man&#8217;s observations.</p>
<p class=""><strong>8</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;For all of these reasons, it might seem antithetical to turn to de Man in an effort to track the relation of literature to life and develop a theory of <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>, unless <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em> is only another name for figure, just as it might be another name for romanticism itself. However, despite his own apparent allergy to questions of life and his indifference to biological processes or political analysis on a grand scale, de Man&#8217;s understanding of figuration has laid the groundwork for other accounts of lyric figures (apostrophe, prosopopoeia) that take place in a more explicit relation to the politics of life, namely those of Barbara Johnson.</p>
<p class=""><strong>9</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In her 1986 essay &#8220;Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,&#8221; Johnson draws upon de Man&#8217;s account of figure to ask whether &#8220;the very essence of a political issue&#8212;an issue like, say, abortion&#8212;hinges on the structure of figure,&#8221; and she goes on to wonder if there is &#8220;any <em xmlns="">inherent</em> connection between figurative language and questions of life and death, of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society?&#8221; (<span xmlns="" class="titlem">World of Difference</span> 184). The key word here is &#8220;inherent.&#8221; For figurative language, insofar as it relies upon a seemingly infinite capacity for substitution, is driven by the establishment of connections where there are none. Figuration is in this sense a matter of the non-inherent, or the inherent as mere substitutability. So, to ask about &#8216;inherence,&#8217; to consider the possibility of an essential and permanent relation between &#8220;figurative language&#8221; and &#8220;questions of life and death,&#8221; or to ask whether figure is the &#8220;hinge&#8221; that bears the essence of politics, including the politics of life and death, as Johnson does, is to suggest that there can be no politics of life without this poetics. Johnson&#8217;s task is to understand and track the meaning and shape of this poetics. Turning to abortion, Johnson conjoins questions of figure or poetic address with what Penelope Deutscher has called &#8220;one of the major nodes of biopolitics&#8221; (55): abortion. Johnson seems to ask, although not in quite so many words, whether biopolitics is essentially <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>. And while she will go on to develop her initial consideration of the inherent relation of lyric figures and politics into a speculative consideration of motherhood (&#8220;there may be a deeper link between motherhood and apostrophe&#8221; [198]), the theoretical landscape is such that she is not yet in a position to reflect directly upon the relation of biopolitics and biopoetics. In the mid-80s, when Johnson&#8217;s essay is published, Foucault&#8217;s various discussions of &#8220;making live&#8221; in the nineteenth century remained overshadowed by his much more substantial considerations of governmentality, the body, and its discipline. Thus, while Johnson presciently evokes the question of the relation between biopolitics and poetics in her discussion of abortion and lyric, it remains a question that still bears asking directly&#8212;one insinuated but not exhausted by the example of abortion and poetry addressed to unborn fetuses. It is also the question, I want to suggest, of the lyric itself. In other words, the question for us, as it is to a certain extent for Johnson, is how important&#8212;how essential or <em xmlns="">inherent</em>&#8212;is life for the discussion of literary rhetoric (or poetry), and is this matter of life, rather than a programmatic attachment, not only a matter of politics, but in fact the political nexus of literature itself? Put another way, the question for us is whether life is the poetic nexus of the political? For Johnson, insofar as politics is a matter of power and power a matter of violence, the essence of any political issue is the question of life and death, of <em xmlns="">the power over life and death</em>. And to suggest that politics &#8220;hinges on the structure of figure,&#8221; as she does here, is also to suggest that it hangs on a rhetorical device that <em xmlns="">makes</em> &#8220;present, animate, and anthropomorphic,&#8221; a device that, recalling Foucault&#8217;s account of political power, makes live. This figure, apostrophe, has a particularly compelling presence in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and an afterlife in some unlikely places. For example, as Johnson shows, it is at work in the case of abortion, where the question of viability may not be altogether new, but it does become newly visible and, thanks to new technologies for managing the ends of life&#8212;from pills to respirators&#8212;newly ubiquitous. Now, as anyone even minimally familiar with the rhetoric around abortion in the US knows, a central claim on one side of the debate is the assumption of fetal life as having an unproblematic relation to human, speaking life, indeed of fetal life as rights-bearing life or as personhood. Hence, as Catherine Mills recently has shown, the use of 4D sonograms in antiabortion materials has as its aim the production of the fetus as a face-bearing entity&#8212;and person or personage. Here, political and poetic rhetoric, the rhetoric of persuasion and the rhetoric of tropes and figures, enter in to a heightened relationship.</p>
<p class=""><strong>10</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Johnson begins by showing how lyric apostrophes, as acts of animation that assume the difference between the living and the dead, turn out to undo the very distinctions upon which they seem to rely. Her initial examples, drawn from Baudelaire and Percy Bysshe Shelley, relay scenes in which a lyric subject addresses an inanimate object in order to endow it with the power that will retroactively animate the very subject responsible for the address in the first place. Johnson reads these poems in the romantic (and post-romantic) lyric tradition in which a (male) poet undertakes to obtain a voice from the outside together with poems (by women) in which &#8220;the question of animation and anthropomorphism is&#8230;given a new and disturbing twist,&#8221; poems that &#8220;textually place aborted children in the spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously addressed by the lyric&#8221; (189). Like Foucault, Johnson seems to register a shift in modernity&#8217;s relation to sovereignty, showing that an emergent structure of animation in the nineteenth century remains at the core of political thinking in the late-twentieth-century; and, like Foucault, again, she is interested in re-reading and re-casting an earlier emergence (which we could in both cases call <em xmlns="">biopower</em>) from the perspective of its violent future.<a href="#7">&#160;[7]</a><a name="back7">&#160;</a> It is in these poems that a new, specifically biomedical uncertainty about the nature and meaning of the living and the dead emerges. It is also here that Johnson explicitly registers a continuity&#8212;or analogy&#8212;between poetry (the rhetoric of animation) and biopolitics (abortion).</p>
<p class=""><strong>11</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Johnson begins her exploration of another lyric scene with Gwendolyn Brooks&#8217; &#8220;The Mother,&#8221; a poem that, in her account, traces the disappearance and appearance of the first person subject, rendering the lyric subject an object of the abortion itself (&#8220;Abortions never let <em xmlns="">you</em> forget&#8221;); the addressee of aborted fetuses (&#8220;I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children&#8221;); and finally the subject addressing them, albeit through a citation (&#8220;I have said, Sweets, if I sinned&#8230;.&#8221;). Even as a subject, she remains uncertain about their status (&#8220;oh what should I say, how is the truth to be said?&#8221;) and thus her own. Indeed, Brooks&#8217; poem reflects a particularly complex case where in actuality she did not want to bring the objects of her address to life even as this animation is what occurs when she continues to hear the voices that sound only through her. Thus, as Johnson notes, &#8220;the poem can no more distinguish between &#8216;I&#8217; and &#8216;you&#8217; than it can come up with a proper definition of life&#8221; (190). This ambivalence about life and death is fundamental to the structure of apostrophe, and in this sense it also reveals what is at stake in abortion itself. Whatever our politics or rhetoric, from the perspective of politics or rhetoric, it is not clear whether a life that is not viable (an embryonic life) can be considered a life at all, just as it is not always clear whether a life, even if not viable, is anything other than a life. From a biopolitical perspective, like the one that Agamben offers at the end of <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Homo Sacer</span>, the fetus also would emerge as one of those lives in which the political and the biological have entered into a domain of indistinction. For Agamben, this would be only a particularly vivid example of a quotidian situation. The same could be said for Johnson, insofar as this is the structure of lyric, a structure upon which &#8220;the essence of politics hinges.&#8221; Yet, for Johnson, who approaches the political scene through poetry and rhetoric, what is at stake is not only the indistinction between political life and biological life, but political life and poetic (or rhetorical) life. Poetry and rhetoric supplement the place of biology so that the question of species, populations, and measure, that is, the objects of social science become a question for literary theory and history.</p>
<p class=""><strong>12</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;My point here is not to suggest that Johnson <em xmlns="">only</em> registers life or death as a fundamentally linguistic (and hence nonhuman) predicament, as de Man does, but to show that her essay raises some highly specific questions about the relation of poetry <em xmlns="">to</em> life and death, indeed the power of poetry (or language) <em xmlns="">over</em> life and death, when it registers the poetic and biological questions of life as thoroughly indissociable. It is in this sense that what Agamben refers to as a &#8220;zone of indistinction&#8221; comes to involve poetry and lyric subjectivity; for lyric (or poetic or rhetorical), biological, and political notions of life emerge as indistinguishable. While Johnson considers the ways that the lyric, as an exemplary form of language, can repeat and re-enact the violence it aims to overcome, she also challenges conventional accounts of lyric subjectivity as they relate to life itself. Johnson not only argues that debates about abortion can be seen as debates about apostrophe and the rhetoric of animation and address, but equally that lyric poetry can be seen as part of the abortion debates&#8212;or construed more generally&#8212;debates within the politics of life. She goes so far as to suggest (while attributing this suggestion to Brooks&#8217; poem) that &#8220;arguments for and against abortion are structured through and through by the rhetorical limits and possibilities of something akin to apostrophe.&#8221; And further that: &#8220;The fact that apostrophe allows one to animate the inanimate, the dead, or the absent, implies that whenever a being is apostrophized, it is thereby automatically animated, anthropomorphized, &#8216;person-ified&#8217;. (By the same token, the rhetoric of calling makes it difficult to tell the difference between the animate and the inanimate, as anyone with a telephone answering machine can attest)&#8221; (191).</p>
<p class=""><strong>13</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;For Johnson, this &#8220;automatic animation&#8221; that occurs within a rhetoric of address raises questions about the relation between what Agamben has called life and form-of-life. Agamben describes his task as completing and correcting Foucault&#8217;s work on biopolitics. He insists upon the ancient origins and specifically modern tendencies of biopolitics by reminding us that initially two words, <span class="foreign"><em>bios</em></span> and <span class="foreign"><em>zoe</em></span>, were used to designate life, and focuses on what he calls &#8220;form-of-life,&#8221; a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life, by which he means &#8220;a life for which what is at stake is living itself, in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply <em xmlns="">facts</em> but always and above all <em xmlns="">possibilities</em> of life, always and above all power&#8221; (<span xmlns="" class="titlem">Means</span> 4). Here, Agamben understands a form of life as separate from automation, repetition, habit, or prescription, seeing it rather as possibility or potential, a relation to the indeterminate and unprogrammed. Agamben distinguishes between this &#8220;form-of-life,&#8221; a life of reflection, and what is translated alternatively as bare or naked life, although even bare or naked life is not simply a given, but an assumed category. Yet, when Johnson suggests that arguments about abortion (about biological or sacred life) are structured &#8220;through and through by something akin to apostrophe,&#8221; and when she suggests that apostrophe <em xmlns="">automatically</em> animates, which is to say that it is a power over life without intentionality, deliberation, or control, she seems to recognize the separability or division within life not as something that could be gotten beyond or resolved, but as the very structure of life, just as it is so central to language fraught between performative and constative powers. The distinction essential to Agamben&#8217;s insight is not at all essential here. This is the parallel of de Man&#8217;s understanding of death as a linguistic predicament, for now <em xmlns="">life</em> emerges as a linguistic predicament; and Johnson suggests that &#8220;it becomes impossible to tell whether language is what gives life or what kills&#8221; (192). Johnson accounts for language or the lyric subject as displacing sovereignty, operating as a power to give or take life itself, rather than a power to kill, as under the older, premodern model. Yet, it is not because of this impossibility of determining the nature of linguistic power that there is a debate about abortion. Rather, what occurs in the sphere of politics shares a structure with&#8212;indeed is&#8212;a linguistic predicament. Johnson reveals that biopolitics, understood as this power over life, is indissociable from lyrical language as a power over life. Thus, returning to my initial questions concerning the concurrent emergence of biopower and romanticism as two nineteenth-century scenes of power as making live, Johnson&#8217;s simultaneous reading of the romantic lyric and <em xmlns="">its</em> legacies with biopower and <em xmlns="">its</em> legacies offers a clear response. Johnson&#8217;s reading of lyric apostrophe suggests that the poetic and political preoccupation with life is not merely an historical accident nor an occasion where poetry reflects the politics or culture of the age, but rather that this convergence, through Johnson&#8217;s reading, reveals the lyrical structure of biopolitics: biopolitics as a politics of apostrophe. In this sense, the politics that Johnson identifies throughout her essay is an unmarked biopolitics, which is structured like the lyric.</p>
<p class=""><strong>14</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;But Johnson&#8217;s essay does not stop here, for it challenges us to consider what happens when this is the case, that is, when politics and poetry hinge upon apostrophe and when making live becomes the operative mode of poetry and politics both. Johnson not only perceives the conjunction of poetics and politics, but also exposes the implications of this conjunction on conventional accounts of subjectivity. It is not just that abortion poetry offers a particular case, and not only that debates about abortion &#8220;hinge on a structure akin to apostrophe,&#8221; but she goes further to show that lyric subjectivity as a variety of subjectivity more generally has hinged upon the assumption or production of a life akin to the one ended in an abortion <em xmlns="">or</em> survived in birth. It is this survival that Johnson reminds us Baudelaire flaunts when he opens <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Les Fleurs du Mal</span> by representing himself as a failed abortion, as an originary survivor. Johnson&#8217;s insight, drawn from her reading of Baudelaire, is that something like fetal or embryonic life remains the life of the lyric subject&#8212;even in its most quintessentially sovereign form.<a href="#8">&#160;[8]</a><a name="back8">&#160;</a> Lyric apostrophe assumes and produces the subject as fetal life. This is true not only in poetry like Brooks&#8217; that takes abortion as its theme, but as the reference to Baudelaire and more generally to romantic and postromantic lyric poets reveals, &#8220;fetality,&#8221; rather than sovereignty, is the position of the romantic lyric subject.<a href="#9">&#160;[9]</a><a name="back9">&#160;</a> Thus, just as Agamben considers the paradox of political sovereignty as positioning the sovereign and the exile in the same position of exceptionality <span class="foreign"><em>vis-&#224;-vis</em></span> the law, Johnson, reading Baudelaire and Shelley after Brooks and Adrienne Rich, articulates a paradox of lyric sovereignty (which is also political sovereignty) as positioning the fetus and the (male) subject in the same position of fetality <span class="foreign"><em>vis-&#224;-vis</em></span> apostrophe.</p>
<p class=""><strong>15</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Penelope Deutscher distinguishes this fetal life from the so-called bare life that Agamben associates with biopolitics. For Deutscher, the distinction is a temporal and categorical one: the fetus is a scene of contested life prior to loss or privation. As she writes: &#8220;A consideration of fetal life does not fit the series [Muselmanner, overcoma, etc.], as it usually is not situated at the threshold of depoliticization or dehumanization of previously politicized or humanized life. The fetus represents the zone of contested and intensified political stakes around the threshold between what some would consider &#8216;prelife&#8217; and what is to be identified as nascent human life, meaningful human life, and/or rights-bearing life&#8221; (58). When Johnson reads Baudelaire and Brooks, she identifies poetic life as a zone of fundamentally contested viability. Yet the difference between Baudelaire and Brooks, on Johnson&#8217;s reading, is that whereas lyric life and subjectivity in Baudelaire are issued from the position of a failed abortion or fetal life, that of the child, for Brooks and Clifton and others it is the position of a mother, albeit one who is not a mother, a mother of aborted or miscarried children live only within the space of literature, and a mother whose position within that space is at once always assumed and almost always denied.</p>
<p class=""><strong>16</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In concluding the essay, Johnson builds upon this understanding to conceive of lyric expression beyond that of the fetus/subject. Spawned by Brooks&#8217; poem as well as other poems of the same subgenre by Rich, Anne Sexton, and Lucille Clifton, poems in which the subject is figured as a mother who is both addressed by and addresses herself to her dead offspring, Johnson suggests that the entire history of the lyric&#8212;of poetry or politics, insofar as it is bound up with calling, is the repetition of a primal apostrophe, the entrance into language and subjection through a demand placed upon the mother who is called upon to make the child live. These poems that remember the stakes of apostrophe&#8212;poems issued in the voices of mothers addressed by children who may never have lived&#8212;also reveal the structure of apostrophic animation. They suggest that the hidden structure of the lyric and its mode of animation resembles and depends upon a mother who is almost always unremarked. Johnson seems to suggest that were we to recast our prevailing accounts of subjectivity, were we to recognize the place of the lyric subject as one not of infinite substitution (&#8220;men have in a sense always had no choice but to substitute something for the literal process of birth&#8221; [198]), but rather of unsubstitutability, we might find a path outside that of childhood (or masculine subjectivity). This suggests that we might come to recognize that the relation of apostrophe to animation is a relation to motherhood itself.<a href="#10">&#160;[10]</a><a name="back10">&#160;</a> The risk of unsubstitutability of the sort that Johnson describes is not simply the loss of lyric power and the shift from a dyadic conception of apostrophic animation (making live) to one that recognizes that the lyric subject figured is a fetus is indissociable from a maternal subject. It is also one that opens up a space for another subject position: that of the mother who does not &#8220;make live&#8221; or who makes live that which she also has let die, even if she may nor have killed.<a href="#11">&#160;[11]</a><a name="back11">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>17</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;On Johnson&#8217;s reading apostrophe emerges as a maternal structure: if the lyric subject is conventionally figured as a sovereign, and if rhetorical reading exposes instead that it is variously a fetus, embryo, infant, or child, Johnson aims to break the fetus-sovereign dyad by recognizing that what has not or cannot be said is that lyric animation is akin to motherhood, that we ought to begin to see the lyric subject not as a man or a child (which is to say a fetus), but as (or wanting to be) a mother.<a href="#12">&#160;[12]</a><a name="back12">&#160;</a> It is as if our failure to recognize the lyric subject as mother has left us with a structure of animation that cannot but leave the subject a child whose viability and power is in question.</p>
<p class=""><strong>18</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Johnson exposes fetal life as the life of lyric subjectivity as we know it. Put otherwise, it is this life that she reminds us Baudelaire already recognizes as the life of lyric subjectivity when he refers to himself as an abortion manqu&#233;. Yet, the lyric subject is a fetus only because we do not see it (or him) as a mother. Rather than an originary split in life, we have an originary question of viability itself (and with it the particularly complex question of rights) at the heart of the subject. Rather than operating like other techniques of power over life, and rather than a symptom of romantic ideology, for Johnson the lyric is the structure of this scene of indissociable power and contestation. While Johnson sets out to revise this scene by focusing on the relation of apostrophe to motherhood, in what follows, I wish to expand our thinking of apostrophe and viability by considering a poem that couples the poetics of life with the history of madness, a poem written by a subject who, like Baudelaire, often was figured as a child, and yet whose own lyric productions recover not a mother, but an asylum.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.2">
<h4 style="text-align: center">II. Apostrophe&#8217;s Inmate</h4>
<p class=""><strong>19</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;I opened with the observation that the romantic lyric emerges alongside biopower as two forms of a power over life. Reading Johnson, I also considered how politics might be seen to &#8220;hinge&#8221; on the structure of a poetic figure, and further that to recognize this structure is to see poetry as assuming a life at the threshold of viability, a situation that further conjoins poetry with biopolitics, at least in the version articulated by Giorgio Agamben. In this last section I want to consider how this conjunction of poetry and biopolitics also leads to a further development in our conception of poetry, and how the lyric has a particularly direct relation to the shift from sovereignty to biopower. For Johnson the presence of the lyric subject indicates the absence of the mother, an absence that Johnson&#8217;s account of the lyric undertakes to remedy. This recovery of the (theoretical) mother&#8212;the establishment a position where she can speak and be addressed and the &#8220;achieve[ment] of a full elaboration of any discursive position other than that of a child&#8221;&#8212;might go far in alleviating certain forms of personal and cultural pathology. But if we were to accomplish this would it be the end of the story? While, abortion&#8212;its poetry and politics - opens up one especially crucial case for thinking about the poetics of animation and politics of life, the various forms of social abandonment and questionable viability fostered by animating acts, whether in politics or poetry, reveal another.</p>
<p class=""><strong>20</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;On December 28, 1841, Clare became an inhabitant of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, one of the genre of institutions that Foucault identifies with the management and restoration of the population.<a href="#13">&#160;[13]</a><a name="back13">&#160;</a> Clare wrote extensively while in the asylum, where he went largely unmonitored. While much of his poetry of this period (he was there until his death in 1864) has not been preserved, an undated apostrophic lyric addressed &#8220;To Mary&#8221; is one of the hundreds of poems that survive. &#8220;To Mary&#8221; conjoins apostrophe and &#8220;lunacy,&#8221; exposing an inherent failure to arbitrate between the living and the dead or the self and another, as both rhetorical effect and medical symptom. It is this disorder that the asylum is called upon to manage, but like the lyric, instead sustains.<a href="#14">&#160;[14]</a><a name="back14">&#160;</a> Thus, if the institutions of biopower are structured like apostrophe insofar as they are oriented towards animation or survival, it is precisely survival or &#8220;making live&#8221; that leads to haunting, confusion, and enduring symptoms of madness.</p>
<p class=""><strong>21</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Clare, famous first for being a <em xmlns="">poor</em> poet and later, a <em xmlns="">mad</em> one, archives this radical privation in a poem that strangely, even perversely, registers the effects of making live. Like the abortion poems that Johnson reads, what we have here is not simply an example of a personal intervention or an encounter with the personal as political, but rather a poem that bears witness to the lyric and the asylum as two scenes of managing life that both house and sustain a form a madness or haunting. In fact, the relation in this case is even closer than first meets the eye, for this poem, like all of those that survive Clare&#8217;s twenty-three year internment, comes to us thanks to its transcription and preservation by the asylum&#8217;s steward, William Knight. There is no remaining manuscript, only a transcript composed in Knight&#8217;s hand. &#8220;To Mary&#8221; is therefore a poem whose survival is the effect of the very institution called upon to keep Clare alive <em xmlns="">and</em> separate him from the living; it is a poem that registers not the work of &#8220;madness and civilization,&#8221; but of &#8220;madness and biopower,&#8221; and the apostrophic or biopoetic structure of both.</p>
<p class=""><strong>22</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Whereas Johnson&#8217;s reading focuses on the relation between political, biological, and poetic life, revealing the limits of the romantic figuration of the lyric subject as man-child, in &#8220;To Mary,&#8221; we encounter romantic animation not from the perspective of the mother, but of the lover who (inextricably from his persistent love) is also an inmate. &#8220;To Mary&#8221; is addressed to a girl that Clare loved in childhood, but whose father prevented their marriage because of Clare&#8217;s low social standing and fate for poverty.<a href="#15">&#160;[15]</a><a name="back15">&#160;</a> While Clare went on to marry and build a family with another woman, Patty Joyce, he remained irremediably attached to Mary, as is evident in the journal that he wrote during his escape from his first asylum, which concludes with a letter to Mary Clare whom he addresses as &#8220;My dear wife.&#8221;<a href="#16">&#160;[16]</a><a name="back16">&#160;</a> In the journal, Clare explains that he is told of Mary&#8217;s death, but that he simply does not believe it, complaining that &#8220;neither could I get any information about her further then the old story of her being dead six years ago which might be taken from a bran new old newspaper&#8221; (264). Clare remains convinced that Mary is alive and often acknowledges that he has two wives.<a href="#17">&#160;[17]</a><a name="back17">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>23</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;As an apparently conventional love poem, one that assumes and reflects upon the communion of a living lover and his dead beloved, &#8220;To Mary&#8221; evokes tropes of remembrance and loss, presence and absence. As a stubborn account of survival&#8212;of life beyond life and death&#8212;it also indicates the poetry and the politics that produces and sustains a life perceived to be unfit for society. What we have here is neither a scene of the mourning&#8212;fulfilled or not&#8212;of a maternal poetics (in which we would have to include Victor Frankenstein), nor a strictly political exclusion that reveals the new politics of public health. Rather, we encounter an apostrophic poetics in which making live coincides with a denial of loss, but in which this denial, this insistent animation, becomes unmanageable and emerges as a form of lunacy. Here poetry and mental illness converge not only through the instruments of lyric, but also the instruments of biopower that resemble them. In other words, the symptom and the remedy (if not the cure) are both forms of apostrophe.</p>
<blockquote class="blockquote">
<div class="stanza">To Mary
<table width="100%"><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">And yet thou art not there;</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">And press the common air.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">Thy eyes are gazing upon mine,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">When thou art out of sight;</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">My lips are always touching thine,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">At morning, noon, and night.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">I think and speak of other things</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">To keep my mind at rest:</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">But still to thee my memory clings</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">Like love in woman's breast.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">I hide it from the world's wide eye,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">And think and speak contrary;</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">But soft the wind comes from the sky,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">And whispers tales of Mary.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">The night wind whispers in my ear,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">The moon shines in my face;</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">A burden still of chilling fear</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">I find in every place.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">The breeze is whispering in the bush,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">And the dews fall from the tree,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">All sighing on, and will not hush,</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr><tr><td width="85%"><div class="l">Some pleasant tales of thee.</div></td><td width="15%"> </td></tr></table></div>
</blockquote>
<p class=""><strong>24</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The poem opens with the chilling announcement&#8212;directed at its addressee&#8212;that while the subject sleeps and wakes with Mary, she is not there. The poem candidly acknowledges the failure of poetic address to solve the problem of absence or death (&#8220;and yet thou art not there&#8221;), and likewise, the failure of absence or death to exhaust direct address and the presence that it remarks and effects (&#8220;I sleep with thee and wake with thee&#8221;). Thus, Mary is at once too resilient and utterly absent. We could say that Mary&#8217;s presence is the effect of psychosis or delusion, <em xmlns="">this</em> is why Clare is in the asylum, and not just the outcome of lyric surmise; and yet we would be hard pressed to rigorously distinguish on the basis of this poem, between madness and poetry. In fact this confusion comports with Roy Porter&#8217;s hesitations about diagnostic readings of Clare, and Porter&#8217;s suggestion that what we call madness in Clare might not be madness at all, just as it might suggest that there is a deeper link between madness and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected.<a href="#18">&#160;[18]</a><a name="back18">&#160;</a> This becomes a poem of madness (rather than passion and allegory) because of its history, because of indicators outside of the poem rather than internal to it. Or, put another way, it is a poem that reveals the conventions of the lyric to be indistinguishable from those markers of mental disorder that are meaningful only outside of poetry, rather than within it. However, in a case like Clare&#8217;s when the lyric becomes a vehicle for autobiography, and indeed in any autobiographical or testimonial text that relies upon lyric figures for its narration, what is at stake is not only the non-opposition between the living and the dead, but the emergence of that non-opposition as a pathology.</p>
<p class=""><strong>25</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In a second episode, Clare describes an embrace that only can remain imaginary, for he fills his arms not with a body, but with &#8220;common air,&#8221; suggesting that it is both quotidian and shared, the stuff of life that signals in this case the absence of the living. And in a line that resonates with Wordsworth&#8217;s &#8220;A Slumber did my spirit seal,&#8221; admits: &#8220;I think and speak of other things/To keep my mind at rest,&#8221; suggesting that Mary, like Wordsworth&#8217;s Lucy, is &#8220;a thing,&#8221; that is, that she is not animate, even as the entire poem is organized around managing the opposite statement. Thus, in a third episode Clare is the object of Mary&#8217;s gaze, but a gaze that, far from direct or reciprocal, occurs only when she is out of sight, which is to say, <em xmlns="">always</em>. The first stanza also concludes with an infinite kiss, a gesture whose possibility relies upon its impossibility and the absence of its recipient (or otherwise a death that it would deliver). As an exercise in the temporal logic of presence and absence, the infinite relation here is presented as an impossible one, one that we might also call literary or poetic. In other words, the power over life described here occurs only in and through poetry (or delusion): this is a life indifferent to certificates of birth and death, statistics, or populations. And yet, it is the very condition archived here, the very condition of a virulent apostrophe, that leads to the convergence of poetry and politics as two scenes of animation, for it is this condition that shapes Clare&#8217;s supposed inability to live among others and his removal in the name not only of his own survival but theirs as well. He is unable or refuses to distinguish between the living and the dead or, put another way, he is unable to choose to reside among the living, and by failing to choose life, by staying with Mary (or by attaching himself to the dead poets, like Shakespeare or Byron, whose poems he will &#8220;continue&#8221;), Clare registers a poetry in which the lyric subject is absorbed by a loss in the dramas of animation. And yet, this is precisely what all lyric poems do when they marshal the powers of apostrophe. What Clare&#8217;s poem then reveals is another scene in the emergence of the poetics of animation and the politics of life: a conjunction not only between romanticism and madness, but romanticism and the asylum.</p>
<p class=""><strong>26</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Returning to Clare&#8217;s poem, we can further specify its experience of apostrophe. If this poem assumes the presence of its addressee, it also breaks the analogy between life and presence, absence and death. Moreover, unlike Shelley or Brooks, Clare asks nothing of his addressee, he merely describes his relation to her. (The nature of this description nevertheless makes it seem a creepy demand.) In a move that seems almost to concede, finally, the absence that the act of address rejects, a move that also evokes some of the moments of strange concession that occur in Clare&#8217;s journals, the poem leaves its addressee in a position of utter non-responsiveness, or to recall the line I noted above, she becomes a <em xmlns="">thing</em>, the matter of this address, rather than its addressee.<a href="#19">&#160;[19]</a><a name="back19">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>27</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In the poem, the solution is not to turn <em xmlns="">to</em> the addressee. Recalling that other sense of apostrophe or trope as turning away, Clare turns <em xmlns="">away</em> from her (&#8220;I think and speak of other things/To keep my mind at rest&#8221;), whether for his own sanity or out of fear of humiliation.<a href="#20">&#160;[20]</a><a name="back20">&#160;</a> Still, the permanent presence of the absent lover archived in the first stanza is repeated in the second stanza where it is the poet&#8217;s memory that remains fixated, even despite the effort to turn away. Here, the <em xmlns="">subject</em> becomes the <em xmlns="">object</em> of address, but it is not Mary who speaks or whose voice he hears. Rather he hears <em xmlns="">of</em> her through the whispering wind. This is the convention of Clare&#8217;s contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley, but also a convention that, as Johnson shows, Brooks reworks by &#8220;textually placing aborted children in the spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously addressed by the lyric&#8221; (189). Still, what occurs here also differs from the address in the other poems, for it is not the addressee who speaks&#8212;directly or indirectly&#8212;through or to the wind; it is not Mary&#8217;s voice that Clare hears. Rather, the wind speaks to him in its &#8220;own&#8221; voice <em xmlns="">of</em> Mary (&#8220;The night wind whispers in my ear&#8230;&#8221;). This apostrophe does <em xmlns="">not</em> raise significant questions about the power to marshal life or death (Shelley) or about the sovereignty of the lyric subject as poet or as mother (Brooks), but exposes the subject&#8217;s impotence and haunting, rather than its ultimate power. It may be that a weak or triangulated apostrophe, like this one, an apostrophe that breaks the dyadic subjectivism of the conventional lyric reveals another poetics of life.</p>
<p class=""><strong>28</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Clare reports to Mary that he hears tales told of her. She at once inhabits the position of the second and third person, just as he inhabits the first and second persons (&#8220;All sighing on, and will not hush, / Some pleasant tales of thee&#8221;). The tales are also the return of what the subject attempts to repress or conceal, figuring yet another scene of ineffectivity. Much as he tries to say something else, the tale of Mary can be displaced, but not extinguished; he can voice it or hear it, but cannot abandon&#8212;or be abandoned by&#8212;it. Put another way, the third stanza seems to describe a scene that might be one of revelation&#8212;that might expose the ghostliness and disturbance of this relation, as if he finally were to learn the truth of her absence and the mistake of his assumption of her presence. However, what is revealed here is instead another form of haunting. Still related to Mary, it is not she, only stories of her; her life and voice are now displaced onto the nightscape. In a turn that already begins at the end of the second stanza (&#8220;But soft, the wind comes from the sky,/And whispers tales of Mary&#8221;), by the third stanza, the world has become animated once more in a speaking scene that occludes the beloved. Mary&#8217;s absence is replaced by the &#8220;whispering&#8221; and &#8220;sighing&#8221; of tales, what Sigi J&#246;ttkandt calls Clare&#8217;s &#8220;mary-ing&#8221; of the world.<a href="#21">&#160;[21]</a><a name="back21">&#160;</a> While the poem initiates with a lyric address, by the end, the subject becomes the addressee, and the addressee, far from disappearing, has become an object. While this is the case in &#8220;Ode to the West Wind&#8221; and &#8220;The Mother,&#8221; here we are left to ask who is addressing the subject? In this case we have not a mirroring, a reciprocal animation, or even a crossing of lyric and maternal animation. Rather, when Clare thinks and speaks &#8220;of other things,&#8221; when he turns from his beloved to the landscape, he finds not that he has turned away, but the very resilience of this passionate attachment. Yet who is attached to whom and how do we decipher a scene in which hyperanimation has riven subject and object, person and place both?</p>
<p class=""><strong>29</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;It is this excessive animation that leaves Clare writing from the asylum, and it is this mode of apostrophe that, like Johnson&#8217;s account of apostrophe in abortion poetry, and for that matter, de Man&#8217;s account of death (and life) as a linguistic predicament leads us to rethink the relation of lyric to life, apostrophe to sovereignty, for it is anything but sovereignty that apostrophe in this instance seems to wield. Yet, the risk of this non-sovereignty is that it remains tied to new institutions in which the nourishment of life and violence against the living are conjoined. The lunatic asylum is just one of these examples. It is the asylum that protects Clare from society, preserves his poetry, transcribes and archives it, and yet that also keeps him from seeing his family for over twenty years (from his commitment until his death). If this poem bears witness to a poetics of life that breaks with the dyadic model, it also can be seen to proliferate it, for when Clare describes the lyric subject as the object of address he may already, proleptically be describing a structure of reception in which his own voice becomes a &#8220;whisper&#8221; and in which is own poem comes to us in a double form, borne by a writer who is ultimately not the poet, and another listener who may or may not be its addressee: William Knight.</p>
<p class=""><strong>30</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Johnson&#8217;s reading of Brooks after Shelley and Baudelaire allows us to witness anew the lyric structure of sovereignty&#8212;and to see in the place of the lyric subject, perceived as sovereign (Mill) or as mute (de Man) before her, a subject whose very viability is in question. My reading of Clare proposes another iteration of lyric subjectivity as it relates to life. The poem seems to rely upon another dyad; no longer mother (living)/child (dead) nor poet (living)/breeze (nonliving); but rather a more familiar encounter between the lover and beloved. Yet here, the dyad, while utterly intense dissipates into a scene in which <em xmlns="">nothing</em> and no one can be fully recovered. Here, uncertain viability is shared between the poet and addressee; just as the power of over life is shared between the poet, his steward, and the whispering breeze. This whispering also returns us to the question of life. It leads not only to poetic fame or posthumous life (as in the case of Shelley or Wordsworth), but also to what Joao Biehl has called &#8220;social abandonment&#8221; or actual incarceration, to a life lived in the asylum. Indeed, behind the relation of lover and beloved, here, there is the relation of inmate and asylum. The inmate who suffers from a confusion of voices, a loss of his actual loved ones, not only his fictional lover, and the disappearance of his manuscript. Yet, a typescript and a place in the archive replace the absent manuscript, a freedom of mobility and protection from worry and poverty substitute for the loss of family and obligation. If these substitutions are forms of &#8220;making live&#8221; they also bear the structure of an apostrophe, like the one in &#8220;To Mary,&#8221; that sustains, rather than remedies a malady.</p>
<p class=""><strong>31</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;What kind of power of or over life is the lyric? Thanks to de Man and Johnson, we have seen how this power can be alternatively, even simultaneously restorative and privative, how it can refigure or transfigure the subject exposing the question of her very viability. Yet with Clare we see how lyric sovereignty dissipates into voices everywhere, and how the question of poetic power intersects with that of biopower, with the rise of the Victorian asylum that became this poet&#8217;s place. In other words, developing Agamben&#8217;s account of the structure of <span class="foreign"><em>homo sacer</em></span> into a poetic claim, we also see how sovereignty and abandonment share a rhetoric; how the lyric is one manifestation of this rhetoric; and how, at least in this case, independent of an originary fissure in the meaning of life we have instead the birth of biopoetics, not a literary biopolitics or a biopolitics of literature, but a lyric thinking life itself.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.3">
<h4 style="text-align: center">Coda</h4>
<p class=""><strong>32</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In 1999, Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner published a collection of essays entitled <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts</span>. In an introductory essay, &#8220;Biopoetics: The New Synthesis,&#8221; Cooke outlines the theory of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) upon which the essays collected in the volume rely, and suggests that the aim of biopoetics is to &#8220;seek artistic universals and features that reflect our common humanity&#8221; (5). In establishing the term <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>, he explains: &#8220;I propose that we add the prefix &#8216;bio&#8217; to the Aristotelian root &#8216;poetics,&#8217; a word which describes the science of at least one art&#8212;there is no English term for the study of <em xmlns="">all</em> the arts. Derived from the Greek word for making, &#8216;poetic&#8217; also refers to our impulse to create beauty. We then nominate the term &#8216;biopoetics&#8217;&#8221; (6). Here, biopoetics is a name for the evolutionary account of aesthetics. This <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>, while in no way evoking <em xmlns="">biopolitics</em>, as elaborated by Foucault, Agamben, and others, nevertheless shares with these approaches a focus on new scenes of scientific method. For <em xmlns="">biopoetics</em>, in this sense, it is a matter of using scientific method to understand the emergence of art as a living thing; for <em xmlns="">biopolitics</em>, in the sense offered by Foucault, it is matter of recognizing how the sciences of demography and public health, among others, obtain a new power over life and the living. Yet, the example of another, critical biopoetics, which this essay has sought to isolate, begins to tell another story, one attuned to a rhetoric of figure and to the question of literature&#8217;s power over life. By taking seriously the relation of lyric animation to the politics of life, we discover the example, not only of a haunting that poetry fails to manage (Johnson, Brooks), but also a mode of subjectivity at the threshold of viability and survival. For Clare, this is manifest as delusion and madness, as the failure to distinguish between what is living and dead and the emergence of the poetic subject not merely as madman, but as psychiatric object. If biopoetics in this sense returns us to Foucault&#8217;s biopolitics, then, it does so by exposing a new humanistic method. This is the inverse of the biopoetics formulated by Turner and Cooke. For rather than dismissing literary criticism and theory&#8212;whether in the name of natural or social scientific method&#8212;it reaffirms literary criticism&#8217;s uncanny ability to say something about life.</p>
<p class=""><strong>33</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;When E.O. Wilson, on the jacket of Cooke and Turner&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Biopoetics</span>, writes that he can see the methods proposed there &#8220;taking over from deconstruction by 2010, and permanently,&#8221; he advocates a methodological turn away from the linguistic and other turns that have marked humanistic method since the 1970s. As 2010 draws toward a close, the prediction seems not to have borne out. It is time therefore that we begin to recognize another biopoetics. Not the biopoetics of evolutionary arts, but of the conjunction of rhetorical and biopolitical reading. This biopoetics sets out, as this essay set out, by admitting two scenes of making live, and it concludes by exposing the impossibility of a politics of life or a science of literature that would be free from poetics.</p>
</div>
<div class="citations" id="body.1_div.1_div.4">
<h4 style="text-align: center">Works Cited</h4>
<div type="listBibl">
<p class="hang">Agamben, Giorgio. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics</span>. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Ball, Joanna. "'The Tear Drops on the Book I Read': John Clare's Reading in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, 1841-1864." <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Wordsworth Circle</span> 34.3 (Summer 2003): 155-58. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Bate, Jonathan. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare: A Biography</span>. New York: FSG, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Caruth, Cathy. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Chase, Cynthia. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism</span>. Essex: Longman, 1992. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Clare, John. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare by Himself.</span>. Ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Clare, John. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Later Poems of John Clare 1837-1864</span>. Ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Cooke, Brett, and Frederick Turner. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts</span>. St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Culler, Jonathan. "Apostrophe." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction</span>. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">De Man, Paul. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Rhetoric of Romanticism</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Derrida, Jacques. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Beast and the Sovereign.</span> . Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Deutscher,&#160;Penelope. "The Inversion of Exceptionality: Foucault, Agamben, and 'Reproductive Rights'." <span xmlns="" class="titlej">South Atlantic Quarterly</span> 107.1 (2008): 55-70. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Foucault, Michel. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History of Sexuality</span>. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Foucault, Michel. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">'Society Must be Defended': Lectures at the Coll&#232;ge de France: 1975-1976</span>. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Gigante, Denise. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Life: Organic Form and Romanticism</span>. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Haughton, Hugh, Adam Phillips, and and Geoffrey Summerfield. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare in Context</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Jacobs, Carol. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bront&#235;, Kleist</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Johnson, Barbara. "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">World of Difference</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">J&#246;ttkandt, Sigi. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">First Love: A Phenomenology of the One</span>. Melbourne: Re-Press, 2010. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Redfield, Marc. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism</span>. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Print.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="notes">
<div class="noteHeading">
<h3>Notes</h3>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="1">[1]</a> For further discussion of <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span> and biopolitics, see the chapter &#8220;Testimony and Trope in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span>&#8221; in my <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism After Auschwitz</span>. While most examples of lyric life are not concerned with the species, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Frankenstein</span> is a notable exception, as it is precisely man as species and its future that is at issue throughout the novel. Furthermore, other iterations of biopolitics, notably that of Giorgio Agamben, are not focused on the question of species (or human as species), but rather of the human and its political possibility and impossibility. For a discussion of the difference between a power <em xmlns="">of</em> life and a power <em xmlns="">over</em> life, see Roberto Esposito. <a href="#back1">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="2">[2]</a> See Berlant, &#8220;Slow Death&#8221; and Santner, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The People&#8217;s Two Bodies</span>. For an account of romanticism attuned to the rhetoric of species and at odds with conventional characterizations, see Alastair Hunt, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Rhetoric of Romantic Species</span>. <a href="#back2">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="3">[3]</a> See Cynthia Chase, Marc Redfield. <a href="#back3">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="4">[4]</a> &#8220;Uncontained&#8221; is Carol Jacobs&#8217; term, see her <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Uncontainable Romanticism</span>. This point can be read to resonate with one of Agamben&#8217;s criticisms of Foucault, that what he identifies as a modern emergence, in fact has an ancient origin. <a href="#back4">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="5">[5]</a> See the lecture of 17 March 1976, where Foucault apologizes for &#8220;this long digression on biopower&#8221; (254). <a href="#back5">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="6">[6]</a> Foucault is of course aware of this uncontainment, and his example of Franco&#8217;s death &#8220;and the symbolic values it brings into play&#8221; in the lectures on 1975-76 offers one example. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Society Must be Defended</span>, 248. <a href="#back6">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="7">[7]</a> Agamben suggests that Foucault doesn&#8217;t do this sufficiently. Also, Penelope Deutscher persuasively considers the reasons why Agamben never takes up the matter of abortion&#8212;in part the complexity of analogizing abortion and the Holocaust, an analogy which is the bread-and-butter of the anti-abortion movement and something one would not want to touch. <a href="#back7">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="8">[8]</a> This is a prescient precursor to Agamben&#8217;s account of the indistinction between the two figures of exception: the sovereign and so-called bare life. See <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Homo Sacer</span>. Also, it is worth noting that Johnson does not distinguish between embryo and fetus, a distinction that is typically linked to gestational age. In this analysis the distinction is not especially meaningful as what remains at stake is viability or the indistinction between living and nonliving which is at issue whether the being is more or less than eight weeks in utero. <a href="#back8">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="9">[9]</a> See Agamben on <span class="foreign"><em>infans</em></span> and infancy. <a href="#back9">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="10">[10]</a> For another account of the centrality of the mother to romantic subjectivity, see Cathy Caruth, &#8220;Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud.&#8221; <a href="#back10">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="11">[11]</a> These formulations evoke Agamben&#8217;s account of homo sacer as a life that can be killed but not sacrificed. See Deutscher for a speculative discussion of Agamben&#8217;s avoidance of abortion in the <span class="foreign"><em>Homo Sacer</em></span> volumes. <a href="#back11">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="12">[12]</a> Of course, Wordsworth had a strong sense of the lyric subject as child. <a href="#back12">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="13">[13]</a> See Joanna Ball&#8217;s discussion of the asylum and its commitment to a &#8220;gentle&#8221; system of care and Jonathan Bate&#8217;s description of the asylum&#8217;s &#8220;liberal regime&#8221; (469). <a href="#back13">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="14">[14]</a> On the intake form at the lunatic asylum, Clare&#8217;s condition is understood as associated with and preceded by &#8220;years addicted to poetical prosing&#8221; (qtd in Bate, 466). <a href="#back14">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="15">[15]</a> For a psychoanalytic and rare theoretical account of Clare&#8217;s love and poetry, see Sigi J&#246;ttkandt, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">First Love: A Phenomenology of the One</span>. Melbourne: Re-Press, 2010. J&#246;ttkandt recalls that Clare believed he was confined in the asylum because of his polygamy. <a href="#back15">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="16">[16]</a> See the &#8220;Journey out of Essex&#8221; included in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare by Himself</span>, 265. <a href="#back16">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="17">[17]</a> See the &#8220;Asylum Observations&#8221; from Northampton, where he writes: &#8220;God almighty bless Mary Joyce Clare and her family now and forever &#8211; Amen; God almighty bless Martha Turner Clare and her family now and forever &#8211; Amen.&#8221; In <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare by Himself</span>, 266. <a href="#back17">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="18">[18]</a> See the essay collected in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">John Clare in Context</span>. <a href="#back18">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="19">[19]</a> For example, in the Journey out of Essex, Clare&#8217;s account of his escape from the asylum, he writes describes his entry into his village and a woman jumps out to great him. He decides she&#8217;s drunk or mad, and writes: &#8220;But when I was told it was my wife Patty I got in and was soon at Northborough, but Mary was not there, neither could I get any information about her further other than the old story of her being dead six years ago, which might be taken from a bran new old newspaper printed a dozen years ago, but I took no notice of the blarney having seen her myself about a twelvemonth ago alive and well and as young as ever.&#8221; <a href="#back19">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="20">[20]</a> In this sense, the poem can be understood not only to use apostrophe, but also to theorize it. <a href="#back20">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="21">[21]</a> First Love 119. <a href="#back21">BACK</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/guyer-sara">Guyer, Sara</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-clare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Clare</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/eric-santner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Santner</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/victor-frankenstein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Victor Frankenstein</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michel-foucault" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/giorgio-agamben" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Giorgio Agamben</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/lauren-berlant" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lauren Berlant</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/barbara-johnson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Barbara Johnson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/gwendolyn-brooks" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gwendolyn Brooks</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/penelope-deutscher" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Penelope Deutscher</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-clare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Clare</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/denise-gigante" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Denise Gigante</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charles-baudelaire" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Baudelaire</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/percy-bysshe-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-de-man" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul de Man</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 02:33:30 +0000Sara Guyer36326 at http://www.rc.umd.eduShelley's Pod Peoplehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2005-02-01T00:00:00-05:00">February 2005</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/aesthetic/index.html">Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container">
<div id="essay">
<div style="text-align: center">
<h2>Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic</h2>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center">
<h3>Shelley's Pod People</h3>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Karen Swann, Williams College</h4>
</div>
<p class="RCabstract">The reader of Shelley&#8217;s poetry repeatedly comes upon beautiful slumbering human forms that exist in charged non-relation to a social world.&#160; These forms suggest a fantasy of &#8220;the aesthetic&#8221; as that which is radically closed to human concerns.&#160;&#160; The Shelley circle&#8217;s posthumous constructions of &#8220;Shelley&#8221; as one who is not of this world are informed by an attentive reading of Shelley&#8217;s poetic figures, including figures of the aesthetic as that which does not matter in terms of human economies of desire and exchange. This essay appears in _Volume Title_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>A certain shape recurs in Shelley&#8217;s verse&#8212;a beautiful, slumbering human form. In Canto 10 of <em>The Revolt of Islam</em>, Laon discovers such forms amidst the ruins of a maddened civilization:</p><blockquote><blockquote><p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;xxiii<br/>
Sometimes the living by the dead were hid.<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Near the great fountain by the public square,<br/>
Where corpses made a crumbling pyramid<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Under the sun, was heard one stifled prayer<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;For life, in the hot silence of the air;<br/>
And strange 'twas, amid that hideous heap to see<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Some shrouded in their long and golden hair,<br/>
As if not dead, but slumbering quietly<br/>
Like forms which sculptors carve, then love to agony.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a></p></blockquote></blockquote>
The stanza adumbrates three classes of being: the living, the dead, and the "as if not dead"&#8212;bodies suspended in and shrouded by their own nimbus, preserved intact within the wreckage. It is "strange" to find these hermetic figures here. They seem to insist on their radical extraneousness to human concern, on the way in which they simply do not matter&#8212;to the plot of this poem, to the scene in which they are posited. Yet that very insistence seems to place them in some relation&#8212;or charged non-relation&#8212;to the overtly social landscape in which they slumber.<br/></li>
<li>
<p>True aliens, these pod people only simulate the natural human body. They are also only "like" Romantic works of art, whether conventionally understood as expressing and inciting human passion, or rendered by Shelley as "seeds" and "dead leaves" that slumber, dormant, until futurity unlooses their incendiary social potential. Where these images are identified with motion, mutability, transference&#8212;the movement of trope and verse itself&#8212;the perpetual dreamers of <em>this</em> passage, with their factitious, arresting glamour, resist metamorphosis, the poetic turn, and all the transformative practices and values we have come to associate with Shelley's poetry. They are thus related to a construction of "the aesthetic" that descends to us from Kant through Adorno: "the aesthetic" as autonomous, enigmatic, auratic form. The stanza could thus be seen to pose the question of the relation of the aesthetic to the social field.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>These beautiful dreamers live a posthumous life, beyond life and death, but transcending neither. I want to suggest that they speak to a fantasy of the endurance of the poet and the poetic work, not as endlessly renewable, socially-efficacious resources, but as forms radically closed to our concerns. They can thus be connected to an experience of Shelley's own poetry, which, however sympathetic we are with recent historicist work that insists on the poet's commitment to social and political change, can strike us as most wonderful at its most difficult and hermetic, the point where it fails to yield to our reading. They can also evoke the exquisite loveliness of Shelley himself as he appears in the accounts of his contemporaries&#8212;as the prematurely arrested figure who never was of our kind.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In the pages that follow I want to look at the Shelley circle's posthumous constructions of "the Poet"&#8212; the one who walks among us like a mercurial visitant from another world, and, more rarely, the closed, immobilized but equally unearthly form that slumbers forever in the hearts of those who knew him. These constructions are cultic but not na&#239;ve, I would argue. They are informed by passionate, attentive readings of Shelley's poetic figures, including figures of the aesthetic as that which adamantly refuses to matter in terms of human economies of desire and exchange. Perhaps, Shelley's ruthless Witch of Atlas suggests, the artist is most loyal to human needs and desires when his art preserves at its core a resistance to our demands.<br/></p>
<h4>I. Shelley's Bones</h4>
</li>
<li>
<p>In 1869, when Edward Trelawny, the friend of Shelley, was in his late seventies, William Michael Rossetti, born after the poet's death, began a series of visits to him. These visits resulted in Trelawny's expansion and republication of his <em>Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron</em>, as <em>Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author</em>. They resulted as well in Rossetti's delighted acquisition of a little piece of bone:</p>
<blockquote>He gave me a little piece (not before seen by me) of Shelley's skull, taken from the brow: it is wholly blackened&#8212;not, like the jawbone, whitened by the fire. He has two such bits of jawbone, and three (at least) of the skull, including the one now in my possession. I must consider how best to preserve it. [cited in Crane, 339]<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li><p>Trelawny had these bones to give away because he was himself a relic&#8212;the last survivor of the small circle who orchestrated Shelley's cremation after his drowning in Italy. By the time Rossetti met him, he had been living for some years off his stories of the poet's last days. Here is his account of his first encounter with Shelley's skull, on the beach off the Via Reggia where the drowned body had washed up:</p><blockquote>We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn on it; this, or decomposition, had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. [Records, 211]</blockquote>
Attended by Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and assisted by a host of Italian officials, Trelawny proceeded to move the corpse onto a funeral pyre and to repeat the ceremony that had been performed for Shelley's friend Williams the day before:
<blockquote>After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. . . . The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put in quarantine. [<em>Records</em>, 212-13]</blockquote>
The fire consumes the elaborate machinery Trelawny has mobilized to produce this spectacle on a recalcitrant, modern landscape: in the end, all that stays with us is the boiling, fabulous body, with its unorchestrated energies, utterly transfigured into something rich and strange&#8212;into the elusive, ungraspable figure of poetic genius.<br/></li>
<li>
<p>Or almost utterly. There is the matter of the bones and the heart that refuse to burn. These become "relics," parts to which accrue the magic of the lost one&#8212;like manuscripts, locks of hair, portraits, biographical anecdotes, other things that originate in physical proximity to the dead person. "Relics" can stand, or stand in, for the lost body itself, in the way a fragment can come to stand for the projected shape of a lost work or corpus. The heart acquired these latter values in the course of its afterlife, which began when Trelawny gave it at the cremation to Leigh Hunt, who begged it of him; Mary Shelley then wanted it, but the uncharacteristically unchivalrous Hunt wouldn't give it up until after some weeks of negotiation. The heart was then encrypted in a locked drawer of Mary Shelley's writing desk, folded in a page of <em>Adonais</em>, where it was discovered after her death and buried. Leigh Hunt, in the meantime, ever after mourned and eulogized its loss: "Cor Cordium," or heart of hearts, is the epitaph he put on Shelley's tombstone; "Let those who have known such hearts and lost them judge of the sadness of his friends," he writes in Shelley's obituary.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a><br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Like Rossetti, who wondered "how best to preserve" his bit of bone, these lovers of Shelley had the passion of collectors and hoarders. But what of Trelawny, who snatched these remains from the fiery furnace only to give them away? He reminds us that the labor of the circle is twofold: to collect the pieces, and to put them back into circulation. An adventurer who gave up a career at sea to follow the poets, the preserver of their deaths and their relics, Trelawny knew that these traces are the stuff of biography&#8212;little bits of material that begin in proximity to the person but only come into their full value when disseminated. If the heart, exposed in its cage, looks especially plummy, worth burning oneself for, perhaps this is less because it represents the core or essence of the biographical subject than because it is the figure of circulation. Trelawny, who tracks the metamorphic career of Shelley's body as it is drowned, buried, disinterred, burned, encrypted, and buried again, like to keep things moving: he keeps alive the "surprise" of the heart's spectacular appearance by passing it along; he keeps always a few bones in reserve, for the ever-renewed delight of the initiate. By these tactics he sustains the magic of the relic&#8212;its reference, not to the natural human body, but to the protean, otherworldly shape of the poet.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A professional romanticist could well find an interest in the career of Shelley's bones somewhat embarrassing: even during the nineteenth century such reliquarianism seemed a particularly excessive and dismissible manifestation of the romantic cult of genius. Yet Paul de Man's important essay "Shelley Disfigured" suggests that versions of this attachment may inform the very construction of Shelley's corpus and the entire history of his reception. In his brilliant, rigorous analysis of Shelley's "Triumph of Life," de Man identifies a poetics of disfiguration that repeatedly erodes and erases what it posits, that "warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence" ("SD" 122). Paradoxically, Shelley's literal death by drowning before finishing the poem has operated to give positive "shape"&#8212;the shape of a fragment&#8212;to a text that is better described as a performance of this negative knowledge. "[W]hat we have done with the dead Shelley, and with all the other dead bodies that appear in Romantic literature. . . is simply to bury them, to bury them in their own texts made into epitaphs and monumental graves . . . They have been transformed into historical and aesthetic objects" ("SD" 122).<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The cultic life of the dead Shelley might seem to be the most na&#239;ve and egregious of these monumentalizing strategies. Yet as de Man repeatedly demonstrates, it is not easy to disengage the valuative work of commemoration from the rigor of a reading. What "shape" circulates in these early accounts of Shelley? In Thomas Hogg's account of meeting Shelley at Oxford, his friend first appears as a "stranger," a visitant, who speaks with no natural voice and is animated by no natural life (<em>SO</em> 6-13). Here is Hogg describing Shelley sleeping:</p>
<blockquote>. . . he would sleep from two to four hours, often so soundly that his slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he lay occasionally upon the sofa, but more commonly stretched upon the rug before a large fire, like a cat; and his little round head was exposed to such a fierce heat, that I used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes I have interposed some shelter, but rarely with any permanent effect; for the sleeper usually contrived to turn himself, and to roll again into the spot where the fire glowed the brightest. . . . At six he would suddenly compose himself, even in the midst of a most animated narrative or of earnest discussion; and he would lie buried in entire forgetfulness, in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he would suddenly start up, and . . . enter at once into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy that were often quite painful. During this period of his occultation I took tea . . . [<em>SO</em> 40-41]</blockquote>
</li>
<li><p>Shelley is here possessed of the charge of the poetic figure, and not just any figure, but his own as described by de Man: he is a shape all light, subject to periodic occultation; or, more fatally put, an evanescent and fading form, continually metamorphosing, vanishing, going under. In the words of William Hazlitt: "His person was a type and shadow of his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light, and his spirit within him</p><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;--so divinely wrought,<br/>
That you might almost say his body thought.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid's fables" (<em>Critical Heritage</em>, 336). And here is Trelawny, who in his <em>Records</em> describes his first encounter with Shelley, who simply disappears from a room of people: Trelawny asks, "Where is he?" and Jane Williams answers, "Who? Shelley! Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where" (<em>Records</em> 22). In the logic of these biographical testimonials, the drowning of this figure is merely a repetition of a characteristic disappearance. In the account of the Genovese captain who reported seeing the spectacle of the <em>Don Juan</em> in turbulent waters: "The next wave which rose between the Boat and the vessel subsided&#8212;not a splash was seen amidst the white foam of the breakers. Every trace of the boat and of its wretched crew had disappeared" (Cameron, 60).<br/></li>
<li>
<p>The "Shelley" who appears in the memoirs of those who knew him is always on the brink of being lost. Most characteristically, he is lost in books&#8212;the natural setting for a poetic figure. The first time Trelawny meets him, he begins to read and translate Calderon: "Shoved off from the shore of common-place incidents that could not interest him, and fairly launched on a theme that did, he instantly became oblivious of everything but the book in his hand . . . After this touch of his quality I no longer doubted his identity" (<em>Records</em> 22). Trelawny's nautical figure suggests that Shelley's immersion makes him vulnerable to drowning. This is literally true: his inability to get his nose out of his book makes him a perilous sailor. But there's also a fatal logic at work here: Narcissus-like, the poet finds and loses himself in other scenes, in landscapes that do not support human life. He's always reading, and he always gravitates toward water, and no one likes to think of the combination, particularly Trelawny, who goes searching for him in a forest one day and stumbles upon an old man who guides him to an ominously Ovidian scene: "By-and-by the old fellow pointed with his stick to a hat, books, and loose papers lying about, and then to a deep pool of dark glimmering water, saying 'Eccolo!' I thought he meant that Shelley was in or under the water" (<em>Records</em> 103).<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This ability to be transported lends Shelley his charm, makes him a marvelous and wonderful figure, a man like no other, according to the recollections of his friends. He seems to have inspired in them the stabbing emotion that a lover of books feels when watching the reader, the obsessive scholar, the writer, when that person seems to carry a capacity for immersion beyond all limits: a love that is an amalgam of identification, protectiveness and dread, and, no doubt, envy and rage. Such a figure seems on the one hand to be in constant need of rescue: to be reminded to come home, to eat, and periodically, to be fished out of the fire or the water. And yet one intervenes at his and one's own peril: when Shelley is sleepwalking or seeing ghosts, or when he's out in a boat over his head, one can only hold one's breath, for the merest gasp might tumble him out of the poise that sustains him. So he is kept alive by constant vigilance&#8212;the practical measures and magical thinking of the circle that forms around this mercurial stranger who does not seem to have attached himself to life.<br/></p>
</li>
<li><p>It's hard to imagine that Shelley, an expert in the allure of the vanishing figure, doesn't intuit this; that there isn't an element of performance in his obliviousness to the world. This is suggested by another anecdote Trelawny tells. One day, swimming in the Arno, Trelawny "astonished the Poet by performing a series of aquatic gymnastics, which [he] had learnt from the natives of the South Seas." Shelley asks, "Why can't I swim?" Trelawny replies, "Because you think you can't," and advises him to try.</p><blockquote>He doffed his jacket and trowsers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in; and there he lay stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself. He would have been drowned if I had not instantly fished him out. When he recovered his breath, he said, 'I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.' [<em>Records</em> 91]</blockquote>
On the one hand, this story tells the usual story: of the poet careless of his cage, always ready to leave this world. But on the other hand, how else could a man who can't swim captivate a man who learned his tricks in the South Seas than by this flamboyantly staged willingness to drown? How else could a man without the will to live provoke the dramatic interventions necessary to keep him afloat? Trelawny's Shelley is a little stooped from a life of being doubled over still surfaces; but it's not always possible to know if his Narcissus posture represents an extreme of self-forgetfulness or of ruthless self-absorption. And indeed, more than any positive image of Shelley as an ideal or etherial figure, it's that undecidability&#8212;the undecidability of a pure self-reflex&#8212;that constitutes his charm.<br/></li>
<li>
<p>The Shelley that circulates in these early biographies is the projected phantasm of his verse: the personification of a negative knowledge and an ungraspable poetics, or, in de Man's words, "the glimmering figure [who] takes on the form of the unreachable reflection of Narcissus, the manifestation of shape at the expense of its possession" ("SD" 109). The posthumous creation of the circle that labored to give shape to the poet after his death, this glimmering figure is neither a na&#239;ve nor an escapable construction. It descends to haunt the most powerful of our modern readings of Shelley, for instance, de Man's&#8212;a haunting symptomized by de Man's gestures of figuration and his inordinate attachment to the figure that refuses to attach itself to any life supports whatsoever.<br/></p>
</li>
<li><p>Death arrests this evanescent form. In death Shelley reminds Leigh Hunt of a "spirit" "found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiffened, its warm heart cold" (Hunt ii, 105). His description recalls the splayed skeleton found&#8212;or fabricated&#8212;by Trelawny:</p><blockquote>Two bodies were found on shore,&#8212;one near Via Reggia, which I went and examined. The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless. The tall slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats's poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt on my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley's. [<em>Records</em> 189-90]</blockquote>
The stiffening of the glimmering figure into the determinate shape of the Poet recalls de Man's claim about the fate of Shelley's corpus, which "stiffens" into the rigidity of an historical and aesthetic object when read backwards through his death. Yet these descriptions of the poet's corpse suggest that "the aesthetic object"&#8212;the static, closed thing that comes to stand for art&#8212;represents less a detour from the rigors of reading than the limit-case of a Shelleyan poetics. Shelley's dead body is the formal, fixed rendering of an infinitely redoubled strategy of figuration. In death, Shelley's bones arrange themselves into the posture of the reader arrested in a moment of absorption, but too late to save himself from drowning; or, perhaps, of the reader already drowning&#8212;doubled over and lost in his book, or in the figure of the dead Keats&#8212;before death's random blow arrests him; or, even, of the reader halted before the "shape" of the dead Shelley, discovering herself already absorbed into his circle.<br/><h4>II. Live burial</h4></li>
<li>
<p>Hunt's image of Shelley as a stiffened ephemeron recalls the exquisite bodies tucked away in the ruins in the stanza I began by quoting. These bodies can in turn be linked to the encrypted form that colonizes the circle after Shelley's death, causing it to stiffen into an obdurate, breakable formation. The beautiful hermetic dreamers of Shelley's poems provide a way to think about the problems attendant upon reading or mourning Shelley. How does one get hold or let go of a radically arrested figure?<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Pod people occur throughout Shelley's work, but they are strangely insistent in <em>The Witch of Atlas</em>, Shelley's great autobiographical poem of 1820. The glamorous Witch is herself a pod person: she spends her days in a cave and her nights in a fountain or well, where she folds into a chrysalis form, a barely animated effigy of herself, recalling her author's stints as conger eel or occulted sleeper:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;xxviii<br/>
This lady never slept, but lay in trance<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;All night within the fountain&#8212;as in sleep.<br/>
Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty's glance;<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Through the green splendour of the water deep<br/>
She saw the constellations reel and dance<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Like fire-flies&#8212;and withal did ever keep<br/>
The tenour of her contemplations calm,<br/>
With open eyes, closed feet and folded palm.<br/></blockquote>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li><p>During the poem the Witch moves out of the cocooning spaces of cave, fountain, and well of fire, to set out on travels that Stuart Sperry calls "a journey without goal or quest" (<em>SMV</em> 154). But like an otherworldly Johnny Appleseed, wherever she goes she collects and sows forms that mime her own encapsulated beauty. Most strikingly, she creates a somnolent Hermaphrodite that briefly accompanies her; then, in the last movement of the poem, she follows the Nile to the seat of human civilization, where she walks by night, "scattering sweet visions" and "observing mortals in their sleep." To the most beautiful of these she gives a "strange panacea" (lxix). When such a one dies, she unwraps the shroud, throws the coffin into a ditch, and lays the body out:</p><blockquote><blockquote>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;lxxi<br/>
And there the body lay, age after age,<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Mute, breathing, beating, warm and undecaying,<br/>
Like one asleep in a green hermitage,<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing<br/>
And living in its dreams beyond the rage<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Of death or life; while they were still arraying<br/>
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind<br/>
And fleeting generations of mankind.</blockquote></blockquote>
Thus her sports leave behind deposits&#8212;figures evocative of poets lost in their creations, of works whose contents have withdrawn into inscrutable form, and of observers absorbed in some other scene than the social landscape they inhabit&#8212;all of which have in common a posture that, borrowing from Adorno, one might call aesthetic "comportment" (<em>AT</em> 12).<br/></li>
<li>
<p>The ubiquity of these withdrawn figures in <em>The Witch of Atlas</em> seems teasingly related to the text's almost complete lack of conversation, in 1820, with Shelley's ambitious, overtly political writing of 1819&#8212;a year that saw the completion of <em>The Cenci</em> and <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> and the composition of new works including <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em>, <em>A Philosophical View of Reform</em>, and "England 1819," all deeply engaged with post-Peterloo England. Indeed, we could speculate that <em>The Witch</em>'s abstracted forms serve to foreground a certain absence of relation: the absence Mary Shelley protested and Percy Shelley insists on in his dedicatory stanzas "To Mary (On her objecting to the following poem, upon the score of its containing no human interest)," where he asserts that his poem tells no story and has no pretensions to an audience&#8212;it is like the kitten's objectless <em>jeu</em>, and the ephemeron that lives only for a day.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a><br/></p>
</li>
<li><p>In her notes to Shelley's <em>Posthumous Poems</em>, Mary Shelley returns to the scene of this disagreement. At the time, she explains, she was urging Shelley to write on "subjects that would more suit the popular taste than a poem conceived in the abstract and dreamy spirit of <em>The Witch of Atlas</em>."</p><blockquote>It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavors. . . . But my persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination. Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope. [<em>PW</em> 388-89]</blockquote>
The context of <em>The Witch of Atlas</em>, she suggests, is not the work of the year that preceded its composition but the professional and domestic disappointments that ushered in, plagued, and followed that burst of productivity. She's thinking no doubt of Shelley's failure to command any audience at all with his writing: by the time of <em>The Witch</em>'s composition, <em>The Cenci</em> had been rejected by Covent Garden, and Ollier and Hunt were remaining silent on all the other pieces. And she hints at the private losses that marked this time: the death of William, the second of their children to die in Italy; her own subsequent depression; the death of at least one other Shelley baby and a further hardening of the couple's estrangement.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Mary identifies Shelley with his Witch: like her, he cordons off an arena of "airy fancy" within which to sport, rather than engaging "human interest." And she suggests that the mercurial play of poet, work, and poetic figure exists in some relation to the sealed-over wounds of the heart.<br/></li>
<li><p>Mary may not be right about this urbane poem, which could be said to have an uncharacteristically strong sense of audience. But she is suggestive about the Witch herself, who exists in a pointed, even comic lack of relation to human passionate life. Her first act is to bolt from the creatures who orbit in the "magic circle of her voice and eyes" (vii): she must leave, she tells them, because she is not of their kind, and not being mortal herself, she doesn't want to get attached to them only to have to suffer at their deaths (xxiii). Her problem with commitment, however, is nowhere more striking than when she abandons the "fair Shape" she herself has created out of a "repugnant mass" of "fire and snow" (xxxv):</p><blockquote><blockquote>A fair Shape out of her hands did flow&#8212;<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;A living Image, which did far surpass<br/>
In beauty that bright shape of vital stone<br/>
Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;xxxvi<br/>
A sexless thing it was . . .<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The countenance was such as might select<br/>
Some artist that his skill should never die,<br/>
Imaging forth such perfect purity.</blockquote></blockquote>
We've been reading long enough to feel a plot coming on&#8212;a version of the Pygmalion myth. This <em>is</em> a Shelley poem: <em>shouldn't</em> the Witch poesy be destined to fall in love with her creation, to love it perhaps "to agony"? Yet by the end of the stanzas quoted, this possibility has been closed off: the Image is a "sexless thing," and its beauty has become the preoccupation of a new artist. For the Witch herself, the Image is less an object of fixation than a way to keep moving: she peremptorily commands it to "Sit here!" in her boat (xxxvii); at her command "Hermaphroditus" (the only time it is named) it spreads its wings and flies her upstream, where she and the poem abandon it (xliii).<br/></li>
<li>
<p>Indeed, the force of Shelley's story could be said to reside in its polemical resistance to the solutions of Pygmalion. Repelled by the "hardness" of the women of his state, the first ever to turn to prostitution, Pygmalion throws himself into his art; only when he sees and falls in love with the woman in the marble does he comes to know his own desire, which the gods then fulfill (Ovid, X, 244-300). His art is thus a form of therapy, a "working through" blocked impulses until desire comes to be known and to speak, and his story belongs to a popular class of narratives of human interest&#8212;stories of the heart's efforts to know and close with its objects. It is thus "romantic," at least in terms of popular accounts of that aesthetic: the tale casts the work as expressive of the genial artist's desires and suggests its power to effect the integration of the person and the overcoming of social antagonisms through its awakening of sympathy and love.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If in the Pygmalion story the aesthetic object serves the interest of the human subject, in the Witch's story the created form is impervious to human needs and aims. The impediment is perhaps in the object itself. The proper name "Hermaphroditus" refers us back to another tale from <em>The Metamorphoses</em> in which latency proves to be destiny. Already bearing the stitched together names of his famously libidinal parents Hermes and Aphrodite, "Hermaphroditus," at fifteen years old, has no interest in awakening to sexual desire: the plot turns on his refusal of the nymph Salmacis, whose pool Hermaphroditus visits. Struck by his beauty, she propositions him; he rebuffs her advances; she retreats into the woods but stays to observe him; he, "as if no one were looking at him," strips and bathes in her pool; incited by his beautiful form, she jumps into the pool after him and clings to his body. When he resists her, she calls to the gods to allow her never to be parted from this youth: and so he becomes "the Hermaphrodite"&#8212;an enervated half-man, half-woman. That is, it becomes a fallen, fixed version of what he was, in a doom he may have even invited: a creature forever before or beyond sexual life (Ovid IV, 287-390).<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>When Shelley imports this story to <em>The Witch of Atlas</em>, he suggests that the creator creates wo/man, not in her own image, but in the image of the Image. If Pygmalian falls in love with the human form he sees in the marble, the Witch's Shape is arresting for the way the marble&#8212;the formal, material dimension, the dimension of "Image" and "countenance"&#8212;swims up into the supposedly living thing. One is caught up, not by a promise of intimacy, but by an apprehension of the radical alterity of this apparitional form to human desire.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a> The Witch's creation thus points to an "abstracting" tendency of Shelley's art, which critics have historically linked to his preoccupation with the "ideal" but which seems better described by, say, de Man's account of the poetry's strategies of "figuration." The Hermaphrodite and all the beautiful slumbering forms of <em>The Witch of Atlas</em> are adamantly unsubjectable: they refuse to satisfy, and they unmask the ruse by which a factitious, formal thing could be said to do so.<br/></p>
</li>
<li><p>And yet&#8212;like Ovid's Hermaphroditus, whose flaunted unavailability incites the nymph Salmacis, and like the beautiful slumbering figure Shelley admired in the Villa Borghese,<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a> the Witch's Image is lovely, "surpassing" the beauty of Pygmalion's statue, and surely capable of becoming the object of someone's fascination if not passion:</p><blockquote><blockquote>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;xl<br/>
And ever as she went, the Image lay<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;With folded wings and unawakened eyes;<br/>
And o'er its gentle countenance did play<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The busy dreams, and thick as summer flies,<br/>
Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay,<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;And drinking the warm tears, and the sweet sighs<br/>
Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain<br/>
They had aroused from that full heart and brain.</blockquote></blockquote>
Indeed, the Image is here the very figure of fascination: of consciousness playing about the countenance, creating and imbibing delicate and evanescent traces of an unfathomable affective life. This sweetly and gently monstrous countenance holds us if it fails to hold the Witch, and it does so in a way that evokes what could be said to be an Ur-scene of attachment, the experience of watching the baby sleep: watching the closed, fleetingly and delicately animated face of the creature to whom it is one's destiny to become attached as it is given over to what the psychoanalysts call "hallucinatory satisfaction," its "dreams"&#8212;neither belonging to it nor exterior to it, and indistinguishable from one's own fascination&#8212;sporting over its metamorphic countenance. In this setting, the observer's love could take the form of wanting to preserve forever this fragile dream of perfect self-sufficiency; to ward off permanently the creature's awakening to a consciousness of dependency and loss, the cost of its entry into human desire, human interest, and human exchange. The purest idolatry, such love would defend the primitive magic of the image from its erosion by life.<br/></li>
<li>
<p>Human beings never willingly give up on a libidinal position, Freud tells us; artists least of all (Freud, 133). D. W. Winnicott even contends without reference to clinical evidence that artists, as a class, are "ruthless" because they simply refuse the guilt that comes with the depressive position (Winnicott, 26). It is possible to see what critics call the Witch's "limitations"&#8212;her failure to form attachments and respond empathically to a rich, complex field of human passions&#8212;as a beautiful refusal to lose. If under the regime of "the rage of death or life" archaic dreams must be forgotten in order that generation after generation of human subjects and their labor can be efficiently cycled into the liveries of various work masters, the Witch's sport would seem to refuse and foil that killing productivity&#8212;particularly when, moving from form to form "like a sexless bee" (lxviii), she takes the most beautiful out of circulation to deposit and abandon them in secret crypts. Her carelessness, her ruthlessness, her refusal of grief, her penchant for airy flight and her somnambulistic returns to the eerie loveliness of the abstracted human form&#8212;all derive their logic from her "defense" of poetry.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thus the poem articulates a fantasy of the poet, the work, and the baby, not as sites for regenerative exchange, but as repositories that preserve magical, archaic things from a devastating human interest. This is a fantasy shared by psychoanalytic theory, which, like Shelley's circle, and like Romanticism in its highest and lowest forms, sometimes casts the artist&#8212;the one who is arrested before growing up&#8212;as a magical throwback to another dispensation, making good on our losses. In the terms of this fantasy, what we might want is not to be engaged by poetry's appeal to our passions, but rather, to preserve poetry's strange distance from human interest&#8212;to reassure ourselves that magical, hermetic poetic figures exist among us, slumbering in secret as we live out our days, entering our dreams by night, keeping alive the possibility of a ruthless, magical refusal of loss.<br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>At the end of <em>The Witch of Atlas</em> the poem's somnolent forms lie suspended, "age after age," amidst a world that "rages" around them. <em>This</em> world is also a world of dreamers&#8212;misers, priests, kings, and lovers whose dreams, as a result of the witch's pranks, become parodic and utopic, unmasking "reality" itself as a collective dream. The witch finally and capriciously becomes the muse of an interventionist poetry. Yet still the figures she has encapsulated slumber on, in significant non-communication with even this transformed social field. The poem's ending suggests the insistent and perhaps founding obduracy of the "the aesthetic" to even the most admirable political visions; and it implies that art may be most loyal to humanity's dreams when it preserves, encrypted within it, a resiliently inhumane impulse&#8212;a ruthless refusal to speak to what we may only imagine are our concerns.</p>
<br/>
<br/>
<h4>III. Coda: The Exquisite Corpse</h4>
</li>
<li>
<p>In real life, of course, if out of idolatrous love you respect too much the capacity for hallucinatory satisfaction of babies, poems, or poets, they fail to thrive. It seems likely that both Mary and Percy Shelley suspected that this was the fate of the Shelley babies who died in Italy; it was arguably the fate of the stillborn poetry. And, psychoanalysis tells us, if a loved object dies before the work of attachment, which is also the work of letting go, is completed, the outcome is not the "working through" of mourning but a refusal to recognize loss: the magical incorporation of the object in the form of a blocking imago, in a move of "hallucinatory satisfaction." Thus the countenance of the sleeping baby who needs for nothing mirrors the exquisite corpse buried alive in the heart of the one who cannot grieve.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a><br/></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>The Witch of Atlas</em> was composed a year and two months after the death of William Shelley, the second of three Shelley children to die in Italy; the year anniversary of his death was marked by the death of the third, Shelley's "Neapolitan charge."<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> The poem's embryonic, unawakened forms conjure these babies who can neither be restored to the living nor be put to rest, as well as the parents who can neither face their continued insistence nor let them die, nor puncture each other's hermetic isolation, nor independently heal the wounds of their separate hearts&#8212;in part because each holds the key to the other's sorrow. They speak to a fantasy of the body beyond sex and the engendering of life and death; and of the body that leaves encrypted babies everywhere, in the shape of quasi-aesthetic objects buried in textual graves. And they speak of the cryptic poem itself, with its aggressively flagged lack of relation to the heart's secrets.<br/></p>
</li>
<li><p>It's possible to feel the pressure of these domestic circumstances in a cluster of poems from this period, including <em>Epipsychidion</em> and <em>Adonais</em>. In these poems, as well as in most biographical accounts of the Shelley marriage, the couple's stuck formation would seem determined by Mary Shelley's stuck mourning: she is the commissioned mourner, while he suffers indirectly when her "coldness" lays him to sleep; he could revive, he suggests half-heartedly, if only something could slake her wound.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a> But what would it take to slake the mother's wound? She herself tells us in <em>Adonais</em>. Urania, the last to visit the corpse of her youngest born, makes an appeal to him and, indirectly, to Death (xxv):</p><blockquote><blockquote>"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,<br/>
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!<br/>
Leave me not!" cried Urania; her distress<br/>
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.<br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;xxvi<br/>
"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;<br/>
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;<br/>
And in my heartless breast and burning brain<br/>
That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive<br/>
With food of saddest memory kept alive,<br/>
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part<br/>
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give<br/>
All that I am to be as thou now art!<br/>
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!</blockquote></blockquote>
The mother asks for one last word and one last kiss&#8212;one breach of death's seal, one instance of mutually avowed attachment&#8212;in order that she may get on with her grieving.<br/></li>
<li>
<p>The Shelley babies in fact died in their mother's arms. But the scene anticipates Mary's experience of the loss of Percy, which had no last breaching moment; rather, the report of the mutilated corpse, the heartless breast, and the burning brain came to her from afar, to stiffen a pointed lack of relation. That report was Trelawny's, of course. After Shelley's death the circle transformed from a volatile dynamic to a formation demanding constancy and allegiance, a change blamed on Mary Shelley by Trelawny among others; historically, biographers have preferred his and Hogg's "lively" Shelley to Mary and Lady Shelley's "idealized" one.<a href="/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a> But the mercurial visitant and the stiffened form are each true, although to different experiences of loss. Trelawny, who thrusts his hand through the wall of the poet's body and delivers it of its previously enwombed form, gives birth to a Shelley possessed of a great heart, and purchases his own mobility in the process. This is the scene that Mary Shelley misses: and so she fails to escape the role of the commissioned mourner, forever constant to and immobilized by the encrypted, wounded heart and exquisite corpse.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Adorno, Theodor W. <em>Aesthetic Theory</em>. Ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. U Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang">Blanchot, Maurice.&#160;"Two Versions of the Imaginary." In <em>The Gaze of Orpheus</em>. Ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis. Station Hill: Barrytown, NY, 1981.</p>
<p class="hang">Cameron, Kenneth Neill. <em>Shelley: The Golden Years</em>. Harvard UP: Cambridge, 1974.</p>
<p class="hang">Clarke, Eric O.&#160;"Shelley&#8217;s Heart: Sexual Politics and Cultural Value." <em>Yale Journal of Criticism</em> 8 (1995): 187-208.</p>
<p class="hang">Crane, David. <em>Lord Byron&#8217;s Jackal: A Life of Edward John Trelawny</em>. Four Walls Eight Windows: NY, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang">De Man, Paul.&#160;"Shelley Disfigured." In <em>The Rhetoric of Romanticism</em>. Columbia UP: NY, 1984.</p>
<p class="hang">Freud, Sigmund.&#160;"The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming." In <em>Delusion and Dream</em>. Ed. Philip Rieff. Beacon Press: Boston, 1956.</p>
<p class="hang">Hazlitt, William. Review of Shelley, <em>Posthumous Poems</em>. Reprinted in <em>Shelley: The Critical Heritage</em>. Ed. James Barcus. Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul: London, 1975.</p>
<p class="hang">Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. <em>Shelley at Oxford</em>. Methuen: London, 1904.</p>
<p class="hang">Hogle, Jerrold. <em>Shelley's Process</em>. Oxford U P: Oxford, NY. 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">Holmes, Richard. <em>Shelley: The Pursuit</em>. Quartet Books: London, 1976.</p>
<p class="hang">Hunt, Leigh. <em>The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt</em>. Ed. Roger Ingpen. 2 vols. Archibald Constable and Co: London, 1903.</p>
<p class="hang">London, Bette. "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity." <em>PMLA</em> 108:2 (March 1993), 253-65.</p>
<p class="hang">Ovid. <em>Metamorphoses</em>. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Indiana U P: Bloomington. 1955.</p>
<p class="hang">Smith, Robert Metcalf. <em>The Shelley Legend</em>. Charles Scribner&#8217;s Sons: NY, 1945.</p>
<p class="hang">Sperry, Stuart M. <em>Shelley's Major Verse</em>. Harvard U P: Cambridge and London, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">Torok, Maria. "The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse." In Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, <em>The Shell and the Kernel</em>. Ed. Nicholas Rand.&#160; U of Chicago P: Chicago, 1994.&#160;</p>
<p class="hang">Trelawny, Edward. <em>Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author</em>. Benjamin Blom: NY, London. 1878.</p>
<p class="hang">White, Ivy Newman. <em>The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics</em>. Duke UP: Durham, 1938.</p>
<p class="hang">Winnicott, D. W. "The Sense of Guilt." In <em>The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment</em>. International Universities P: Madison CT, 1996.</p>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> All quotations from Shelley's poetry and M. Shelley's introductions are from <em>Shelley Poetical Works</em>, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. G. M. Matthews (Oxford University P:&#160; London, 1970.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back1">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> For accounts of the heart controversy, see Smith, pp. 1-2, and Hunt ii, 100-102.&#160; Hunt's obituary is reprinted in White, p. 321.&#160; For an astute account of the way the heart becomes emblematic of and imbricated in contestations about Shelley's cultural value, see Clarke, especially pp. 188-89.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back2">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> In <em>Shelley's Process</em>, Jerrold Hogle argues that the poem's sport&#8212;its playfully capricious relation to plot and readerly expectations&#8212;is its mode of social engagement:&#160; the poem works to break the hold of mythic narrative, including those deployed to shore up a repressive modern order (pp. 211-22). But lining and countering this play, I would argue, is the poem's proliferation of figures of the "not-in-play":&#160; images that on the one hand gesture toward an art radically incommensurable with social experience, but on the other, verge upon the sort of fixity, glamour, and ideological potency Hogle claims the poem as a whole critiques.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back3">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> For an account of this period see Holmes, Chapters 24-25.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back4">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> My discussion here is indebted to Maurice Blanchot's "Two Versions of the Imaginary."</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back5">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> See Holmes, p.605.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back6">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> This is the argument of Maria Torok's "The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse."&#160; My discussion here and throughout the latter part of this essay is deeply indebted to <em>The Shell and the Kernal</em>, the collection of essays by Nicholas Abraham and Torok in which Torok's essay appears.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back7">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See Holmes, pp. 518, 596.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back8">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> See, for example, Shelley's two short poems to Mary from this time, each entitled "To Mary Shelley" (in <em>PW</em> , p. 582).</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back9">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> For an especially virulent expression of this preference see Smith, pp. 1-36. London's "Mary Shelley, <em>Frankenstein</em>, and the Spectacle of Masculinity" begins with a brief, suggestive account of the gender dynamics implicit in various representations of the poet's death.</p>
<p class="indent">
<a href="#back10">Back</a>
</p>
<p class="smalltext">
<a href="#top" shape="rect">top of page</a>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/swann-karen">Swann, Karen</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/shelleys-the-witch-of-atlas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Shelley&#039;s &#039;The Witch of Atlas&#039;</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/543" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">aesthetics</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/shelley-biography" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Shelley biography</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/shelley-circle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Shelley circle</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/demans-shelley-disfigured" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">DeMan&#039;s &#039;Shelley Disfigured&#039;</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/leigh-hunt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Leigh Hunt</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-hogg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Hogg</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/trelawny" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Trelawny</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-williams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Williams</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/percy-bysshe-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-de-man" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul de Man</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/karen-swann" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Karen Swann</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/oxford" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oxford</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/italy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Italy</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:25:40 +0000rc-admin16307 at http://www.rc.umd.edu